Month: February 2016

I firmly believe that if the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump for president, he will lose. I may be wrong.

At any rate, if Trump is to become president it will have to be without my vote.

One advantage to living in a reliably red state is that I can afford to “throw my vote away” without worrying that I’d be helping to elect Hillary Clinton, so all you “fall in line” peckerwoods can go jump in the Trump cesspool without me. As I’ve said before, if a Republican nominee needs my one vote to win Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, he’s got bigger problems than just my opinion of him.

Instapundit links a German listicle detailing a few of the reasons why comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler is stupid.

I agree with the premise, but I didn’t bother reading the listicle because I’m pretty sure my reasons are better — even if only because Germany isn’t the most disinterested country on that whole Hitler thing…

My reasons? To start with, Hitler wasn’t a vulgar anti-intellectual — at least not in terms of style. Maybe it was his art school years or his association with decadent German intellectuals after World War I, but Hitler sought to organize his genocidal ideology on a logical framework. Plus, he subscribed to a genocidal ideology.

Trump is nothing like that. He is vulgar, scatterbrained and unintellectual. He has no coherent ideology, much less a genocidal one. Even comparing him to Mussolini, which I have done on occasion, is off the mark because even a vulgar thug like Mussolini was a more organized thinker than Trump is.

I managed to watch about ten minutes of Idiocracy, so I didn’t see this “President Camacho” character some have compared Trump to. I suppose if Camacho had managed to turn a multimillion-dollar inheritance into a much smaller fortune, while claiming to be a multibillionaire, that comparison is more apt.

Months ago I conisidered Trump smart. I’ve gotten to know him better since then. He may actually be dumber than most of his supporters, which is a hell of an ouch.

Did you know that this site was, until just a minute ago, part of the “deep web”?

Yes, even though it’s hosted by Google.

You see, all it takes to be part of the “deep web” is to keep your site from being indexed by search engines. I just now changed that setting (though I’m still not allowing this site to be on Blogspot’s public listing; I do still have some pride).

If you’ve been under the impression that “deep web” and “dark web” were the same thing, then either I was, until just now, as dangerous and evil as Silk Road — or you need to reconsider your usage.

If you have a website that you’ve set to not be indexed on search engines, and didn’t realize that it made you a denizen of the “deep web,” congratulations. You are now officially cool.

If that’s the sort of thing you like.

Anyway, now that Twitter is dead to me and so many others on the right, I expect to do more blogging than I had been doing, which means being more findable.

I’m hoping the onetime standard practice on BigBlogs of having the blogroll on the front page will be resurrected.

Via Instapundit, a link to not only an appalling attempted miscarriage of justice and attempted corruption of the electoral process, but also an inspiring censure of same by U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon.

The judge opened the hearing by reading into the record an astonishing letter he had just received from the chair of the EAC [U.S. Election Assistance Commission], Christie McCormick. It informed the court that DOJ had told the EAC that it would not defend the agency, and that it would not allow the EAC to hire its own counsel. McCormick informed the judge that she believed DOJ was not fulfilling its duty and obligation to defend the EAC and had a potential conflict of interest.

It was clear that Judge Leon was shocked at what DOJ had done.

I’m not, and probably neither are you. If you wonder why the Left goes to the lengths it does to silence those who tell the truth about them, it’s because they know that not everyone will refuse to hear that truth. They couldn’t keep Judge Leon from hearing it, and using the authority of his bench to box their ears.

Leon is a Bush appointee though, so you may rest assured the mob will rain down calumny and vitriol on him, as they are wont to do.

The way to beat such attacks is — to paraphrase the British WW2 morale poster — Keep calm and stay focused.

Here I wrote of my two degrees of separation from John Wayne, and added in an update that a young, not yet famous Duke had made the acquaintance of Wyatt Earp in the 1920s.

This morning I happened on the story of a modern-day Wyatt Earp, descended from one of the original’s brothers, who was starring, as of 2011, in a one-man play about the Wild West legend. Curious, I resorted to Google and Wikipedia, and found that the only Wyatt Earp brother known (according to Wikipedia, for what that’s worth) to have had sons was his older half-brother Newton, who died in Sacramento (my boyhood hometown, as noted in “Who Needs Bacon?”) in 1928.

I grew up in a house from which I could look out my bedroom window and see the mausoleum at this cemetery.

I’m not sure how this affects my degrees of separation from Wyatt, since Newton died before either of my parents had ever heard of Sacramento. I certainly never saw the grave as I never went into the cemetery myself.

Now, it’s possible Virgil, James or Warren Earp might have had sons that Wikipedia neglected to mention, so that particular question remains unanswered. However Newton did name his two sons after brothers Wyatt and Virgil, which names might have been handed down to subsequent descendants.

I could email the guy and ask, but it doesn’t seem like a good reason to bother him.

Update: Holy carp. Newton’s son Virgil* is buried in the other cemetery I lived near in Sacramento, before we moved the other place near East Lawn. I don’t recall ever entering that cemetery either.

‘Nother update: Just remembered something else. As many of you may already know, Sam Elliott — who played Sacramento Virgil’s uncle Virgil in Tombstone — was born in Sacramento.

This is getting spooky.

‘Nother other update: Wyatt Earp played cards at least once with Soapy Smith, who was born and raised somewhere not far at all from where I am sitting right now. Of course, Wyatt’s best friend Doc Holliday was born in slightly less nearby Griffin.

Though I lived in Alaska, I never got to either Nome (where Wyatt had a saloon) or Skagway (where Soapy ran a gang).

‘Nother other other update: According to Ancestry.com, Newton’s son Wyatt had a son named Frederick Wayne Earp, who lived in Sacramento for close to 50 years until his death in 1978 at the relatively young age of 59 — when I was 16. I have yet to find reference to any children, but they could still be living. Fred’s uncle Virgil doesn’t seem to have any sons recorded in Ancestry.

This is getting out of hand update: Tracked down the cemetery in Woodland, California, where the famous Wyatt Earp’s nephew Wyatt is buried. During my college years I had friends in Woodland who lived mere blocks from this cemetery. I visited them, but (again) never the cemetery.

Incidentally, while Ancestry has this Wyatt dying in Utah, as Find-a-Grave agrees, it also claims he died there in 1920 rather than the 1937 shown on his marker. Now, Ancestry also claims Wyatt II’s wife died in 1920, so I suspect there was a data input error at some point on Ancestry for Wyatt.

It boggles my mind how I grew up so surrounded by Earps and didn’t know it. I wasn’t even all that interested in the Earp legend back then, really. If I had, I suppose I would have wondered why all these Earps were to be found in Sacramento, of all places.

Make it stop! update: Have just found that one of Virgil II’s homes (c. 1943) was one block over from where my father worked during the 1960s.

I cursed that he should live to become the first centenarian president, knowing every day from the moment he leaves office, that he was a failure as President, a disappointment to his supporters, a figure to his detractors not of hate, but of scorn and contempt.

This, of course, required that no harm whatsoever come to him during or after his presidency.

The other day we received an intriguing letter from someone on Atlanta’s north side, offering to buy our place.

It was addressed to the late mother-in-law’s “family,” and made no mention of the fact (thank you Google) its sender is a realtor. It’s intriguing for two reasons.

The first is that, of course, the first name on the deed is that of a recently deceased person. It’s often safe to assume that whoever inherits a property from a deceased family member probably would like to make a quick and uncomplicated sale to disencumber the estate of such an illiquid asset. In our case that’s an errant assumption, but this person wouldn’t have any easy way of knowing that.

The second is that there have been rumblings about this immediate area due to a planned new road that would funnel even more traffic past our place. Developers have been hard at work accumulating properties in our particular corner of the neighborhood in anticipation of a potential growth boom when the new road is built — in about 15 years. We think it’s probably the prime mover in the contact we just received.

We’re not ready to sell yet, but if the new road stays on track we are planning on being out of here long before the bulldozers roll. Unfortunately the likelihood of development means the things we liked about this place four years ago won’t be effective selling points when we’re ready to go. At least, not if we want to feel good about making the sale.

This particular contact feels a bit underhanded, since the only appearance of the word “realtor” in the letter gave an impression that the sender wasn’t one. And of course the reason for interest in our property — from so far away — was never stated. We have a friend here who’s a realtor who handled both our purchase of the home acres and our sale of our previous home. It’s reasonable that we’d go with her when the time comes.